


I'm Sorry

by kj_feybarn



Series: Ruminations of Ghosts [1]
Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith
Genre: And he feels a lot of guilt, Emotional Hurt, Force Ghost Shmi Skywalker, Force Ghost(s), He deserves happiness, Obi-Wan Kenobi is a Mess, Obi-Wan tells Shmi he's sorry, Shmi forgives him, Shmi's trying to comfort him, Tatooine, but that's not THIS story, sort of comfort
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-18
Updated: 2018-09-18
Packaged: 2019-07-13 19:45:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,904
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16024718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kj_feybarn/pseuds/kj_feybarn
Summary: The Jedi are dead and Obi-Wan Kenobi is alone. Alone with his guilt and his pain and all of his regrets.He can't fix this.All he can do is apologize. Even though he doubts he could ever be forgiven.





	I'm Sorry

**Author's Note:**

> This story isn't a long one, and it's not a particularly happy one. Though it was one I felt I had to write. 
> 
> Mostly it's about love and forgiveness, about choosing love and choosing forgiveness. It's about acknowledging when people cross lines that can't be forgiven, and about loving them anyways, but never condoning what they did. It's about family, and how sometimes families break.
> 
> I don't know, it's about a lot of things.

"I'm sorry." His voice was hoarse, whether it was the after effect of inhaling too much volcanic ash, of singing a baby to sleep over and over during the long weeks it had taken him to make his way here to Tatooine, or just his grief and pain stealing the vitality out of his voice Shmi couldn’t say. Hoarse or not, the words were unmistakable in their sincerity; his devastation, his broken-heartedness, his regret laced each word.  
   
He kept repeating himself, the words tumbling out of him in fits and bursts, halting and stuttering and so unlike the man she’d been watching for the past few years, always right alongside her son. She had been amused the first time she’d really paid him attention, at how smoothly he spoke, it was so at odds with the frankness with which most people on Tatooine spoke and a stark contrast from her own son’s loud brashness.   
   
She had always loved her son’s brash straightforwardness. How could she not, when it was such an intrinsic part of her son’s being?  But she had grown to appreciate the way this man had turned the simple act of speaking into an art form, had made his words seem like a gift given to him from the Goddess, herself.  
   
Yet here he was now, running only on the same mixture of desperation and determination that had helped him make it to Tatooine, his words as broken as the rest of his world, repeating himself over and over again, as though he hoped that if he said it enough she would grant him her forgiveness. That somehow the words would be enough to make up for everything that had gone wrong. And oh, things had gone so very wrong.  
   
He stood in front of her grave, ignoring the suns as they moved across the vast expanse of sky above him, one sun following the other in a pursuit that would never be realized. He was either ignorant of the sun sickness that would inevitably come if he did not find shade and water or simply unable to care. If Shmi had to guess, she thought it was likely the latter. His own life had never seemed to mean much to him in the first place, and it seemed to mean even less to him now.  
   
“I wasn’t enough.” He whispered, a confession and a condemnation both. “I wasn’t enough for your son. I’m so sorry.” He shook his head, eyelids scrunched together as he tried to stop the tears from falling. “I tried, I did. But I wasn’t enough. I failed to be there for him. I failed to be what he needed me to be. I’m so sorry that I wasn’t a good enough teacher, a good enough friend.” His voice cut out, as though the words were hurting him. “I’m sorry that I wasn’t a good enough brother.”  
   
For years she had watched him, first because he was with her son, and then later because he had earned his own place in her heart as her son’s brother, yet she had heard him sound this broken only three times before. Not while at war despite all the pain and fear and grief it had inspired in him, not even while holding his beloved Duchess as she died, despite the way he had looked as though his very heart was being ripped from his chest. No, she’d only heard this broken sound when he had been surrounded by children, dead, in the place he called home, and then again, when on the bank of a river of lava begging her son not to try, and finally while forcing himself to say goodbye.  
   
His knees seemed to give out on him and he sank to the ground the sand shifting beneath him. Brown cloak wrapped around him, he was the picture of the weary traveler reaching the end of their pilgrimage only to find that their very faith had been used against them. That there was nothing for them at the end of their journey.   
   
It would be easy, she thought, for Obi-Wan to lose faith in everything. The Force, humanity, justice, truth, peace. It would be so very easy for him to give up.  
   
But Death had not stolen Shmi’s ability to see the measure of a man. And even now, his world shattered around him, Obi-Wan hadn’t given up, wouldn’t give up.   
   
“I’m sorry.” Finally the tears began to fall, his whole body trembling with the power of his sobs and the strength of his grief as he mourned.  
   
And as he mourned, Shmi mourned with him. Mourned the betrayal of friends and loved ones, the slaughter of innocent children who would never have deserved the fate they’d been given, the fall of a Republic that had never helped her but that he had so fiercely believed in, the death of a woman he considered a friend and who she had grown to love as she’d watched said woman love her son.   
   
Together they mourned for the boy they had both loved, his brother and her son, who had done things they could never accept and had become someone they could not approve of.  
   
Shmi could still see a blue blade raised against trusting younglings, her son’s face twisted with rage and grief and fear and determination. She had cried out, praying that her voice would reach her son even though experience had taught her she wouldn’t be heard.   
   
She recognized that he was afraid, afraid of loss and loneliness, afraid of being powerless. Oh, Goddess, she understood how hard it was to feel powerless. It was something she had never wanted her son to have to feel again, though she had known he would. Sooner or later, life made everyone feel powerless.  
   
But she had taught him to love when it was hard, to help when he was hurting, to protect those who couldn’t protect themselves. Even now when she closed her eyes she could still see her boy, small and serious repeating her words back at her. ‘You said the biggest problem in the Galaxy is no one helps each other.’ When had her son forgotten that?  
   
But despite what he’d done. Despite what he’d chosen to become. Despite the fact that Ani had broken her heart, broken his brother’s heart. It did not steal her love for her son, just as it did not steal Obi-Wan’s love for his brother.  
   
So they mourned the betrayal, and the loss, and the death. And they mourned for him.  
   
Shmi was not surprised when the grief left Obi-Wan exhausted, was not surprised when he eventually succumbed to that exhaustion, falling into a fitful sleep. Instead she just stood guard over the other half of her son’s soul.  
   
“I know you’re sorry.” She told him. She carded blue hands gently through his hair, the same way she had for her own son, when he had been plagued by nightmares as a child. Except everything that had happened, everything that was happening now, was too real to be a simple terror of the night. It was a terror that Obi-Wan and the rest of the Galaxy may never be able to escape from, but she would give what meager comfort she could. “And I forgive you, for whatever that’s worth.” She sighed. “You weren’t perfect, but no one ever is.”  
   
It would be easy to blame him. Shmi was wise enough to know that. She understood the Galaxy enough, and she understood the darker parts of humanity enough, to recognize where the fault would be placed by those looking for someone to blame. But she had been a slave for too much of her life to not understand and value the ability to choose. She knew what it meant to choose something, because for so long she hadn’t been given a choice. And maybe her precious Ani hadn’t felt like there were any good choices available to him. But she could not disregard that he had still made a choice.   
   
All of them had made choices.  
   
Obi-Wan hadn’t been perfect. He hadn’t always understood her son. The two of them were so very different from one another, that sometimes even when looking at each other they had not seen one another. But Shmi had watched Obi-Wan try, sometimes clumsily, but he had tried.  
   
She remembered watching what had happened on Mustafar. She had not thought that she could be haunted by memories after death, but between what had happened in the Temple and what had happened on that cursed planet, she knew that her afterlife would forever be haunted by the memories of what she had seen.  
   
Obi-Wan had struck her son down.  
   
It would be so very easy to hate him for that.  
   
But Shmi had not survived most of her life in slavery, pulled drop after drop of water from the Tatooine desert, or held on through the torture of the Sandpeople until her son arrived because she gave in to what was easy. Hate was always easy. Forgiveness, compassion, love, especially in times such as these, were always so much harder to find, so much harder to give. But she had overcome things far more difficult.  
   
“I don’t blame you for what happened with Anakin.” Saying the words helped, and she knew they were true, so she said them again, hoping that somehow the Goddess would let her words find their way into his dreams. “I will never blame you for what happened with Anakin.” She looked out as the suns began to fall below the horizon, it would grow cold tonight, as it often did in the desert, though she wouldn’t feel it. She hoped his robes would be enough to keep him warm.  
   
“I love my son. I will always love my son.” She smiled softly, achingly, her love was a deep ache in her soul, but it was so very real, and so very strong, as endless as the sands of the desert. “Do you know what that makes you? You are his brother, and that means you are my son as well.” She laughed a little bit, it wasn’t the joyous laugh that it should have been, it couldn’t be, not now. “We never met in this life, which is a shame, I would have enjoyed meeting you. But I have watched my son, and by extension you, for years now.” She still watched them, a part of her here on Tatooine and a part of her on Coruscant as a new Emperor paraded her son around as though her son was nothing more than a prized pet or a toy he’d stolen from the child next door. As though her son was nothing more than an expensive slave he’d won in a bet.  
   
She had thought she had given her son Freedom. It hurt to realize that perhaps she had been wrong. She felt as helpless now as she had when Gardulla was her Master and Anakin was just another tool for the Hutt to barter with, when Watto was putting Anakin in a pod and making him race because Anakin was just a way for Watto to make some extra money, when there wasn’t enough food and her son was hungry because she and Anakin weren’t worth the investment of providing enough food.   
   
Her son was enslaved again and beyond her reach.  
   
She could not free her son. She couldn’t even comfort him, the way she had all those times before.  
   
She looked down at the man collapsed in front of her grave. Even in sleep tears slid down his cheeks. His grief and pain could not possibly be numbed by something as trivial as unconsciousness. “You loved him as a brother. I know you did. I saw it. And he loved you. I know you doubt that now, but he truly did love you. And I believe that he still does, though he can’t find that love, hidden and buried as it is underneath his fear and his anger and his hatred.” And she had never thought that her son would be capable of such hatred. Not her beautiful Ani, who had only ever wanted to help people. But life was cruel and hard and painful, and hatred was so very easy in a world like that.  
   
“I know you are sorry. I do. And I forgive you because you loved my son, you believed in my son, believed that he would never fail you, never fail to be the good man you truly believed him to be. It is all I could have ever asked of you, it is all that anyone could ever ask of you. You weren’t perfect, but neither was I, or Padme. But we loved him, we trusted him, and we’ll keep loving him even as he goes down a path that we cannot follow. I forgive you, because you were doing what you believed you had to.” This man who believed in freedom, and peace, and protection. Who had looked at her son and seen destruction and tyranny. And, Goddess, it hurt that he hadn’t been wrong. Whatever reasons her Ani had told himself, whatever his rationale, it didn’t change the innocents dead at his hands, the destruction he had wrought. It didn’t change what he’d done.  
   
She gazed down at the weary, heartbroken young man, worn down by a Galaxy that had taken everything he had to give and then thrown him away. “Don’t give up on him. He’s lost, and it may take him a long time to find his way back to us, but I have to believe that someday he will, so please don’t give up on him.”  
   
She sighed, no air escaping from her ghostly form. “Sleep on, young Obi-Wan. I’ll watch over you.” He shivered, the first hint of night cold already settling in now that the suns had set.  
   
The night passed that way, only the hunting call of a Krayt Dragon echoing over the dunes disturbing the tentative peace that had fallen between them, the ghost of a woman and a shadow of a man.  
   
As the first sun rose over the horizon the sleeping Jedi began to stir, pulling himself up with slow movements that made him seem ages older than he was.  
   
But Shmi knew firsthand how grief could age a person.  
   
“I must have been more tired than I thought,” he muttered quietly to himself as he rubbed the sand away from where his tears had caked it onto his cheek. He looked at the sand now on his palm. “Anakin always hated sand.” The name came out choked, it was perhaps still too soon to look back at when things had been good. For him it might possibly always be too soon to look back without being overwhelmed by his grief. “I can see why, barely been here a day and it’s already getting everywhere.” Shmi laughed lightly, though Obi-Wan didn’t react, just as she’d known he wouldn’t. He looked, at this moment and despite his age, every inch a tired child, alone in the world and trying so very hard to be brave.  
   
He was so very different from her son. But so very similar all the same.  
   
He sat there for a while longer, unmoving as he stared contemplatively at the tombstone that marked where her body lay buried. Shmi sat next to him, waiting patiently. “I never met you.” His voice was tired, but it did not carry the same hoarse emptiness it had carried the day before. “But you must have been a great woman, Shmi Skywalker Lars.” He sighed, looking out past her tombstone and into the endless desert. “I’m truly sorry.”  
   
She smiled sadly at the young man, letting her hand rest gently on his. He closed his eyes, and his hand trembled, and perhaps it was a sign that some small part of him was aware of her presence, even if his senses showed him nothing. “I know. I know you are. I forgive you.”  
   
He stood slowly. “I better get going. It’s time I figure out where I’m going to live for the rest of my life.” His face paled and he stumbled as the words seemed to hit home for the first time. “Oh Force.” He turned his head away, as though trying to hide his grief from both her and himself.  
   
She watched him, worried. She shifted, placing her hand on his cheek, her fingers brushing over the tear tracks, there was still sand caked on his cheek where he’d missed brushing it off. “You are strong, Obi-Wan Kenobi. And you’re not alone.” She was here, the ghost of a woman he’d never met, but she was here. She would watch over him with the same dedication and care that she would employ to watch over her own son.  
   
Obi-Wan didn’t react. To him, her voice nothing more than a whisper on a non-existent wind. “I still love him, Shmi. He is my brother. I think I will always love him.” He bowed his head as he turned away from her grave and his voice reached out to her a final time. “I’m so sorry.”  
   
She nodded sadly, looking at a man destroyed and trying desperately to rebuild himself, so out of reach from what little help she could offer. “So am I.”

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Lys, who helped make this story better than it was!
> 
> Thank you for reading this story, I hope you enjoyed it. Have a wonderful day!


End file.
